Converso, (Spanish: “converted”), one of the Spanish Jews who adopted the Christian religion after a severe persecution in the late 14th and early 15th centuries and the expulsion of religious Jews from Spain in the 1490s. In the minds of many Roman Catholic churchmen the conversos were still identified as Jews, partly because they remained within the Jewish communities in the cities and partly because their occupations (merchants, doctors, tailors) had been monopolized by the Spanish Jewish people. Such identification caused many Christians to regard conversos as a subversive force within the church.

In 1499 a staunch and somewhat fanatical Roman Catholic, Pedro Sarmiento, wrote the anti-Semitic Sentencia-Estatuto, which prohibited conversos from holding public or ecclesiastical offices and from testifying against Spanish Christians in courts of law. That statute was followed by the 16th-century laws of purity of blood (limpieza de sangre) which further strengthened the laws against anyone of Jewish ancestry and were more racial than religious in nature. It was not until the late 19th and early 20th centuries that some of the legalized prejudice against Jews in Spain was modified.

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The conversos and Marranos—the “new Christians”—became a highly controversial group throughout Spain. Many of these converted Jews and their descendants assumed important positions in government and society and associated themselves with powerful noble families. They also achieved economic power and prosperity, which inspired...

...a great pogrom against the Jews erupted in 1391 and rapidly spread throughout the peninsula. Forced to choose Christianity or death, many Jews converted. A number of these conversos, freed of earlier legal restraints, now attained prominence in public life, but they were always suspected of continuing privately to observe Jewish practices. The demand that...